2050

The time of the cosmic advent

The decade 2050 to 2060 begins a priori as a perfect continuation of the previous one.

It should be noted that global warming continues its momentum. Indeed, in 2050, global warming (and its consequences) will kill around 175 million people, and every year it will kill around 6 to 7 more.

But the population is decreasing. Moreover, almost at a constant pace, the Earth will lose net about 330 million people per year, due to the collapse of births coupled with the end of the seismic era.

In 2057, birthes have dropped to 15 million. At this point the population is then just under 1.9 billion. It is made up mostly of people between the ages of 20 and 50. The youngest for the most part haven’t survived, for lack of food and care, and because of climatic deterioration. As for the oldest, for the same reasons, they all died, the last to hold at the age of 65/70 died in the early 2050s.

At this stage and at this rate, we know that runaway weather will kill the vast majority of the remaining 2 billion in waves of 330 million each year. We now know that 2065 is basically the deadline.

In this decade, the two most absolutely insane things will happen on exactly on the same date, November 11th. Exactly 1 year apart.

The first is that there is a cosmic traveler, of an absolutely gigantic size (about 600 km long, 100 wide and 200 deep) which must pass close to Jupiter, then Mars, then Venus then the Earth. Fortunately, it must graze the earth because its size is so large and its speed (90 km / s) so enormous that if it were to impact with Earth, it would be about 1,000,000 times more violent than 66 million years ago, when the impactor achieved the feat of extinguishing almost all terrestrial life and had marked the end of the dinosaurs. Just that !

A few years earlier, the orbital center of world telecommunications had kept in operation , thanks in particular to the energy contribution of the neighboring STEPs, a satellite radar which could detect these large NEOs. Vestige of the last launches around 2038, they still functioned correctly 15 years later. Maintained by passionate engineers who had only that to do after finding something to eat, they made the necessary calculations to orient the dishes, modify the orbits and facilitate communications across the continents.

The interest of this gigantic near-Earth cruiser is that its trajectory being known, it was easy after a parabola repair to point towards it and to check the good functioning of the parabola. And it worked all the time. Until March 21, 2053. The near-Earth cruiser that was to pass close to Mars was not in its place as expected: very clearly a slight deviation had taken place. Without panic, however, what was left of the scientific community got to work, did the calculations and discovered that in fact, its trajectory had both changed little but the NEO had started to turn on itself. Concretely, this meant that a body that had not yet been spotted had hit the near-Earth cruiser very violently, rather towards the rear.

The calculations that followed were complicated. Indeed, with a rotation around its center of gravity and a passage less than 300 km from the surface of Mars, while the largest dimension (the long diagonal) of ℵ 0 is of the order of 800 km, all can happen. In any case, the answer would arrive at the latest on September 11, 2054, the day of the great brushing.

Et c’est le 11 novembre 2054 que la mauvaise nouvelle arriva.

Indeed, that day, the community had the result: the near-Earth cruiser brushed against Mars so much that it broke into several pieces. The different trajectories of the chunks were pretty good but one was actually worrying because heading towards Venus, a return to Earth by gravitational catapult was not impossible.

And it was on November 11, 2054 that the bad news arrived. A piece the size of several tens of kilometers was going to shoot straight for the Earth, with an impact at the beginning of 2062. The size was such that it was useless to wonder what to do. It was going to be basically a lot worse than 66 million years ago and the end of the dinosaurs. Thus, the current extinction around 2085 was actually going to end in February 2062. On the 21st, around 5 pm NYC time, 11 pm Paris time.

Death had a name: Haribu - ℵ 0 -2061-11, with the simple diminutive: ALEPH0 (ℵ0) . Death also had characteristics: 113 km in diameter, a speed of 23.7 km/s at the time of impact and an energy to be released close to 71.1024 Joules.

Death had a little brother, who would also come 1 year later: 1-Sai-no-otōto 2062-11 (1歳の弟). Discovered by the Japanese.